


right now you should've changed the world

by elevensie



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Carolina Hurricanes, Homeless Shelter AU, M/M, war veteran au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-19 01:46:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1450765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elevensie/pseuds/elevensie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which, Jeff is a bonfire and Eric is nothing but ashes. </p><p>(Or how smelly shelter food and orange mugs bring people together)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was Thursday night, the air was crisp, and the night was young. The remaining pastel tones of sunlight were slowly melting over Raleigh. A few newcomers were lining up in front of the counter. A woman adjusting a scratchy sweaters and eighties’ windbreaker shyly asked for a cup of coffee. “Two creams, no sugar.” Jeff repeated as he handed her the beige mug. “Have a wonderful day, Miss.” He seemed to repeat this action over and over, switching between coffee and meatballs, meatballs and coffee, offering a little warmth by showing his teeth kindly, shaking hands, patting backs. It was a routine he couldn’t get tired of. He fed his soul with that positive energy, each interaction more nourishing than the other. Many times, he had been asked why he spent his days at a homeless shelter, ‘ _serving smelly, almost good-for-garbage meals to strangers_ ’.Perhaps, it was because of all the smiles he received as he poured spoonfuls of broiling gravy inside people’s small plastic plates. Since he had started working at the shelter, he had most likely served about two thousands of them and each and every single time he was greeted with wide eyes filled with gratitude and encouraging grins. Jeffrey couldn’t get enough of it. There was something so delightful about life, about people. The smallest little details, like watching a child attempting to write a message with his green peas or an old lady insisting on giving him an few cents were all it took for him to come back every afternoon, at 4. He needed that contact to feel alive. To be alive.

He was listening to a man complain about his ex-wife with an irritated tone when he heard his name being called from the kitchen right behind him. He apologized to the client, offering him one of his wide smiles and assuring him that he was “way better off without her” before stepping away. Their division supervisor had recently been relocated, giving his position to a man Jeff couldn’t help but love. He had a very warm presence just like his, almost bonfire-like, and encouraged his volunteers with flattering remarks and an excessive amount of thumbs up. He insisted on everyone calling him JML, just like his initials stated but Jeffrey liked to think of him as a father to the shelter and had to stop himself from calling him ‘Papa Cane’.

“ _Before The Hurricane_ ” (Hurricane’s for short) was quite frankly a shitty organization, with a brighter past than future ( _and a really stupid name, for that matter_ ) but Jeff had grown to love it with all of his heart. The comfort was not to be found inside the crumbling red brick walls or the terrible heating system. The washrooms were dirty, too often vandalized with vile writings on the stalls. The kitchen was too small and they frequently bumped into others, dropping dirty plates and utensils all over the lilac tiles. They had to shut down the bed unit a few months back (due to bed bugs and lack of money to kill said bed bugs). Everything went wrong, yet everything seemed just right. “You can’t assure their happiness forever, but 20 minutes is still a good start”, JML repeated. ( _Murphs said that sounded like something the manager of a stripper agency would say. Jeff couldn’t get that thought out of his head_ ). Once again, the division manager was standing in the kitchen, with both hands on his hips, his round blue eyes shifting between the dirty sink and another employee cutting carrots.

“Jeffrey, hello!” he beamed. “We’ve got this guy, in the back of the lunch area. He’s been sitting in front of his coffee for an hour now. Would you be kind enough to check if he’s alright? You can offer him a new one and I think we’ve got some wheat cookies left in the backstore.” Jeff nodded and made his way to the back of the dining room. Children with dirty ginger locks were running around. The bitter divorcee from earlier was still there, telling his entire life story to yet another stranger. A frail elderly lady was struggling to drink her soup, her trembling fingers wrapped around the bowl. Yet, no matter how crowded the lunch area was, the man seemed to have chosen the only empty table, the slightly crooked one, right next to the window. There appeared to be a constant but gentle draught in that corner, probably explaining why everyone else avoided it. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the breeze and was glaring at the milky surface of his now cold coffee, as if he expected something to jump out of it.

“Pardon me, good sir” Jeff whispered not to surprise him as he reached the table. “We’ve noticed you’ve been sitting here for a little while and-“

> \- “Do I need to leave?” he spat in a tone that sounded a lot more anxious than he probably would’ve hoped.
> 
>  - “No, no of course not, sir.” Jeffrey shook his head nervously. “I’m only asking for your wellbeing. I wanted to make sure you were happy with the beverage we gave you. We find hairs in them sometimes, it happens. It’s just that Faulk refuses to wear a hair net.” He abruptly stopped. “I should not have told you that…” He spoke very slowly, his cheeks turning a bright carmine. “It doesn’t happen that often, I swear! I mean… I can bring you another one if you’re not pleased with it.”

The man looked up at him with a subtle grin, just so that it would light up his face ever so slightly. Jeff’s was almost brutal, a blinding dimpled smile, aggressively bright like a Pollock painting. The stranger’s smile resembled a dim street light, bashful and modest, inexplicably warm despite its weary exterior.

> -       “Why would you offer to give me a refund for something I didn’t even buy?”
> 
> -       “Satisfaction guaranteed.” He could almost hear his supervisor’s voice echoing in his head. “Or… Well, fair enough we can’t give you your money back, but I can always offer you wheat cookies.”
> 
> -       “The coffee’s fine.” He nodded twice and his eyes drifted back to the table. “It’s just the mug… I’ve seen this mug before.”
> 
> -       “It’s possible. We receive box of plates and utensils from different organizations. I believe we got those orange ones from the Army. They’re quite nice, eh? Orange is a nice color. Pretty underrated, too.”
> 
> -       “I mean, I owned one of these.”

Jeff had to deal with delusional and psychotic visitors in the past (people screaming at their cannelloni, one man swearing the kitchen sink was his and another one waking up in the middle of the night shouting the lyrics to a pre-Victorian religious chant.) Every single time he felt powerless and terrified. It always left him feeling empty inside, as if everyone’s wounds were his to heal and he could not fix theirs. He crossed his fingers and hoped the stranger wouldn’t be one of those, trying to convince Jeffrey that he had bought this mug in a past life or that it was heritage from his great grandmother from Poland.

> -       “Like I said, I think they’re a donation from the Army, so…”
> 
> -       “Like I said, I owned of these.” He replied, mimicking Jeff’s words. He pulled on his collar, revealing below his sweater the logo of the Canadian Armed Forces printed on his worn-out shirt. “Enrolled in 2003, sent to Afghanistan in 2005.” He put his hand up and showed him three fingers. “Three years. That’s a long time, trust me. Veteran, eh? That’s what they call it?”

The young man couldn’t expect a more surprising response. He was waiting for another foolish explanation, some made up mumbo jumbo but his reply was more than unsettling. Jeffrey didn’t know much about war (nor did he really want to). From what he saw on TV, in the papers, it was mostly just suffering, blood, sweat and despair. Nothing he would wish on anyone. That was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. How could one choose such a life? And most importantly, how could he have ended up here, haggard, sitting in a dirty soup kitchen?

> -       “I am… I don’t…” He was at loss for words. _Jeffrey Skinner, the guy who always knew what to say, how to say it, how to comfort and take care, was dumbfounded._
> 
> -       “I wouldn’t say no to a wheat cookie. Are they any good?” The stranger interrupted him before he could mumble another clumsy word.
> 
> -       “Yes, th-they’re baked here.” He cracked his knuckles to try and gain some confidence again, visibly unsettled. “By a guy who wears a hair net. I swear.”
> 
> -       “I’d love one then. If you don’t mind, I’ll keep the coffee?”
> 
> -       “That’s alright, sir.”
> 
> -       “Come on kid. Don’t call me sir, you’re gonna make me feel old. Eric. No mister, no captain, no dear ol’, just… Eric.”
> 
> -        “Alright, I’ll be right back… Eric.”

 


	2. lay down your weapons, boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which listening makes Jeffrey a human pack of matches and a man is born from his own ashes.

There he had been, for over an hour, sitting on a plastic chair that hurt his back, telling his entire life story to a kid he didn’t know. Eric wasn’t much of a talker and even less of a bragger. There was nothing impressive to him about his journey as a soldier. He had witnessed deaths, plenty of them. Saw more corpses on the field than he saw flowers. “ _Their old wounds, save with cold can not more ache. Having seen all things red, their eyes are rid of the hurt of the colour of blood forever_ ” Wilfred Owen had once written about warriors, in his poem _Insensibility_. Eric had himself grown to become those men with scars on their face and hollowness in their eyes. The whole world had become desaturated a little more with every gun shot, every drop of blood, every night spent alone with a knot in his stomach or a void in his chest. Pain makes you colorblind, they say. Yet, this boy looked like a Leonid Afremov painting. With a smile that could probably power all of North Carolina, Jeff, as he introduced himself, had twelve different shades of scarlet on his cheeks. Eric could’ve named every single one of them, as if his giggling face was one of those color palettes you find in hardware stores.

Thankfully, the young man had come back to sit right next to him and not on the seat facing the table. It would’ve been nearly impossible for the poor soldier to stay focused if he looked up at the employee’s eyes. Never had he thought that the color brown could shine so bright.

> -       “Rod the Bod? That’s a funny nickname! Were you allowed to call him that? Even if he was an officer?”
> 
> -       “He was a neat guy. I don’t think he minded too much…” Eric ceased his explanations. “Wait, I’m sorry… It just, it keeps bothering me. Why are you listening to this? Don’t you have things to do? Things to live as an eighteen-year-old other than listening to me ramble about these things?”

Maybe it was because Jeffrey seemed so young and the only looks he ever got from the youth were pitiful or scornful but Eric had a hard time believing someone like him would sit by his side for so long and be so interested in the tales of a small Canadian platoon. How radical of a change was it for him to be seen as a hero rather than a pariah? He was waiting for someone to pull out a camera and yell “ _You’ve just been Punk’d, nobody gives a shit!_ ”.

> -       “First of all, I’m twenty one, despite what most bouncers seem to think. And I think your story is fascinating... I’m sure it’d make a good book or a great movie. And you’ve got way more things to teach me than those dirty plates piled up in the sink, waiting to get washed. People in general usually have more things to say than plates.” He chuckled once more. “Haven’t you ever looked at someone and thought ‘I wonder what’s their favorite type of ice cream?’ or what they were scared of as child? Or maybe what was the name of their first crush or the most embarrassing thing they ever did.”
> 
> -       “I… No. I mean… Have you?”
> 
> -       “Plenty of times. And just now too. People have so many things to share. _You_ have so many things to share. It’d be a shame to waste a life, let it go unknown and silent, forever.”
> 
> -       “So this is charity?”
> 
> -       “Oh no, it’s free counseling. For me. I read a book in high school that said ‘There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet.’ Priests are intimidating and poets are usually snobs. You, you’re like the Yoda of the 21st century! Except that you have a very lovely skin tone, don’t worry.”

He laughed once more at his own remark and Eric cracked a smile, despite how resistant he tried to be. He could feel Jeff’s knee bump against his as he snickered softly. Those layers of washed out jeans subtlety brushing against each other gave out a type of warmth he had not felt in months: human warmth. He was shaken by genuine joy and compassion and interest. This volunteer he had only now just met cared like nobody had in the past year of his life.

From his first day home after he was sent back because of his injury to the first night he had spent sleeping on a park bench, in between the army’s shrinks and doctors, so many people had known his name, spent hours listening to him tell again the story of hundreds of people getting murdered right before his eyes, young families with bleeding calloused feet from walking for hours in the rough sand and the numerous times he had seen a child and known he wouldn’t make it to the next week. And so words kept pouring out of his mouth like waterfalls of trauma and emotional distress and the young man listened, nodded, questioned. Jeff was more of a mop than a sponge (no matter how unflattering that comparison might’ve sounded), sweeping up each word he said without soaking up on his suffering. He couldn’t fix everything, for people are not vases and smiles are not glue, but he could clean up the mess surrounding Eric little by little.

The hand kept running along the clock, hours slowly drifting away after each heart wrenching anecdote, the veteran moving from disgusting dry foods available in Humvees to the day a man asked him to shoot his dog because he was starving. Eric spoke until his mouth went dry and his mind felt numb and only then, after making sure over six times Eric would be alright spending the rest of his evening on his own, Jeff got up and made his way to finally scrub the greasy platters, a task he had been procrastinating on for a barely acceptable amount of time.

He was standing in front of the doorframe leading to the kitchen when an orotund voice echoed in his direction.

> -       “Pistachio. Clowns. Emily. And getting so drunk in college, I pooped my pants.” Eric shouted at the other end of the now empty dining room.

Jeffrey’s head turned in his direction, the orange coffee mug still in his tired hands.

> -       “What did you say?”
> 
> \-       “Your questions from earlier. I like pistachio ice cream. I had nightmares about clowns until I was 15. My first crush was a girl with ginger hair called Emily, in the first grade. And I have never been as embarrassed as that time I drank so much vodka I ended up shitting in my own jeans when I was 18. ”

Jeff did not speak for a few seconds and looked down to the lilac tiles once more, shamefully hiding his blushing face.

> -       “Vanilla. Thunderstorms. Can’t remember. And mistaking Don Cherry for a type of cocktail.” He replied with a shy smile.

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to Kait because I started writing this for her birthday and also Layla because she came up with this AU in the first place.


End file.
